To Boldly Go

I’ve lost track of how many times I’ve watched the video released by NASA last month of Perseverance         descending towards the surface of Mars and then gently landing on it. (Click here to watch. You won’t be sorry!) I don’t know much—or rather, anything—about the aerodynamics of space parachutes, but watching this spacecraft slow down from its initial descent speed of 1000 miles per hour and then gently plop down in the center of the thirty-mile-wide Jazero Crater is just riveting. The event itself was not unprecedented—an earlier visitor named Curiosity landed on the Martian surface in 2012, but it didn’t have any cameras aboard to record the landing. (It’s still there, by the way, completing today as I write its 3137^th day on Mars.) Nor was Curiosity the first vehicle to set itself down on Mars—that would be the old Soviet Union’s Mars 3 probe that landed on Mars in 1971 but only managed to convey data to earth for 14.5 seconds before conking out. And there have been other attempts as well, most notably probably the Mars Exploration Rovers of 2003 and 2004.

What intrigues me the most, I suppose, is that the point of sending Perseverance to Mars is not to collect soil samples or to chart the geography of the planet, but specifically to attempt to answer the question of whether there was ever life on Mars. It’s widely understood that Mars once flowed with water. So the question—way simpler to ask, apparently, than to answer—is whether we can find the chemical signatures of fossilized microbial life that could have flourished when Mars was wet. Perseverance, a rover the size of your average car, also has along for the ride a little helicopter named Ingenuity to fly overhead and attempt to see what would not be visible from the ground. I’m completely into it! But I have to stop thinking of Perseverance and Ingenuity as the Martian versions of Star Wars’ C-3PO and R2-D2. (That would be silly. Or would it be?)

Like many people my age, I suppose, I grew up dreaming about the planets and about the possibility of human beings actually visiting them. Nor was I alone among my classmates at P.S. 196 to dream in that direction: space adventurism was just part of who we were back then. (I was eight years old when Alan Shepard became the first American in space, nine when John Glenn became the first American to orbit the planet.) I remember both those events clearly, but more than that I remember the specific way that neither felt like an end unto itself, but far more meaningfully as one more step forward on the great journey that would eventually bring us to Mars and beyond.

It may have been a generational thing. My parents, for example, did not dream of Mars. For them, in fact, the whole space thing was more of a contest than a science project and the specific point was not to do any specific thing at all, only to do it before the Russians got there and did it first.

But for me and my pals in fifth grade the whole space thing had nothing to do with beating the Soviets and everything to do with conquering new frontiers. Nor was this something we intuited on our own: when that disembodied voice opened every new episode of Star Trek (our favorite TV show, and by far) by referencing space as “the final frontier,” we all understood it to be saying almost clearly that our brave astronauts were merely the latter-day descendants of the brave settlers who risked everything to move west in their Conestoga wagons and establish an American presence in the western part of North America back in the nineteenth century. (That the parallel was not at all that exact—in that the crew of the Enterprise was not seeking out that “new life” and those “new civilizations” so that they could push them off their own soil and settle there themselves—did not dawn on me back then. Or at least as far as I can remember, it didn’t.)

I was on my way into twelfth grade when Neil Armstrong set foot on the surface of the moon and the sixteen-year-old me was still possessed of the same enthusiasm for our nation’s space program that the younger me felt so keenly. But I had evolved in other ways by then: I still dreamt of travel other planets, maybe eventually even to other solar systems, but an element of social justice had crept into my field of vision and part of the point of pursuing the exploration of space, my hip teenaged self thought, should be precisely to use each successive discovery as a way to combat the kind of parochialism and provincialism that allowed so many of our fellow earthlings—centuries after Copernicus—still to think of our home planet as the center of the universe.

By the 1970s, of course, no one would admit to actually thinking that. Everybody understood perfectly well that the planets were in orbit around the sun, that the solar system itself was part of a much larger galaxy that contained not some other stars, but about 400 billion of them. But although no normal person would have insisted that the sun and the stars travel around the earth, the world continued to behave as though that were the case, as though the earth were the center of all existence. The adolescent me saw in space exploration the ultimate way to combat that kind of self-serving provincialism…and, perhaps, in so doing to ween humanity away from the supposition that the universe exists to serve their needs.

By college, I had moved on in my space-fantasy-life to wonder more seriously about the search for extraterrestrial life and to wonder, given our endless interest in meeting the neighbors, if it could just possibly be the case that the neighbors were just as interested in meeting us as we were them. And if that were the case, then was it not just a matter of time before we actually would hear from them? And by “hear from them, “ I meant really hear from them, not via a momentary glimpse of a mysterious silver orb in the nighttime sky or an otherwise inexplicable blast of radio noise from somewhere out there in space—but in the specific way the residents of Hispaniola heard from Columbus on December 6, 1492, when he landed on their island—where Haiti and the Dominican Republic are today—and simultaneously changed the history of that island, this hemisphere, and the world utterly and forever in as long as it took him to step off his ship onto dry land. And yet those neighbors have never come a-calling. Or have they?

A few years ago, I wrote to you all about Oumuamua, a cigar-shaped reddish rock about 2600 feet long that scientists noticed one day hurtling through the cosmos. (To read what I had to say then, click here.) I left the matter unresolved, but had it drawn back to my attention just recently with the publication of Avi Loeb’s Extraterrestrial: The First Sign of Intelligent Life Beyond Earth, published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt in January of this year. Loeb, a professor of science at Harvard and the chairman of its Department of Astronomy, has studied all the data and concluded that the most likely explanation for the existence of Oumuamua in the first place is that it is a kind of light sail, a spaceship that gets its energy from sunlight or starlight and that was either launched by some alien civilization in our direction or else set out in the cosmos as kind of in-place space buoy (in which case it would be more correct to say that it was we who ran into it). The book was reviewed both worshipfully and harshly—some of the reviews were respectful, while others were filled with the same kind of sarcasm born of ill ease and disbelief that once greeted the theories of Copernicus or Galileo. I read the book and enjoyed it, finding the argumentation plausible and the conclusions, if not fully convincing, then at least intriguing and challenging.

The chances are excellent that we will never find out if Professor Loeb was right or wrong about Oumuamua. It—Oumuamua itself—is long gone into interstellar space; we’ll debate it for a while, then let it fade into the background among other unproven theories relating to the distant neighbors we feel certain must exist but have, at least as yet, been unable to find any clear trace of. But I continue to feel certain that the neighbors are out there…and that they day will come when they come to call and we on earth finally have no choice but to seize just how tiny a piece of God’s great universe our little planet actually does constitute. Will that happen anytime soon? There’s no way to know…but if Professor Loeb is right about Oumuamua, the doorbell could ring now any time. It’s clear that Perseverance is not going to find Mars filled with little green Martians eager and able to establish diplomatic (and every other kind of) relations with their counterparts on Earth. But each step we take towards exploring the cosmos makes it that much more likely that we will attract the attention of extraterrestrial space watchers gazing at the heavens and waiting for signs of life on a planet other than their own.